That was when the numbness began to subside, and Paige realized that her feet were very sore—until then, she’d forgotten that she’d rushed outside without her shoes, chasing Austin.
Now, other parts of her body awakened, as things warmed and unfurled inside her.
Austin slid his good arm underneath her and used his strength to roll her on top of him.
“That’s better,” he ground out.
“Austin McKettrick—”
He moved his hips beneath hers, and though she’d been aware of his powerful erection before that, now she was hyperaware. “You. Feel. So. Good.”
Paige tried—though, admittedly, not very hard—to move aside.
Austin lifted his head off the pillow, and snagged her mouth in a kiss.
She forgot to protest.
He kissed her senseless. Kissed her until she had to come up for air or smother, right there on top of him, with his magnificent hard-on pressing into her belly and his arm still locked around her waist.
“We can’t,” she said.
A great sigh moved through Austin’s frame, though he had, at least, stopped shivering. “I know,” he replied.
“We’d need a condom,” Paige heard herself say, and was mortified.
“I don’t suppose you happen to have one handy,” Austin reasoned, and while there was a teasing quality in his voice, Paige suspected that he was more serious than not.
“Of course I don’t have a condom handy!” she sputtered.
“Shhh,” Austin said. “Everybody in the house will hear you.”
Paige’s cheek throbbed with heat—and so did her body. She had to get off Austin, she decided. Eventually.
“Not in this house, they won’t,” she said.
Austin was easing her nightgown upward, very slowly. “Well,” he told her huskily, “if both of us can’t be happy, at least one of us can.”
Why didn’t she get off the man? She was behaving like some kind of—tramp. A red-hot mama, ready to get it on.
She was naked under her nightgown—she was keenly aware of that—and if he hauled it up much farther, there would hardly be anything between her and his erection.
“Austin.” The name came out as part whisper, part moan.
Skillfully, he maneuvered her upward, at the same time relieving her of the nightgown. Bared her breasts and then promptly caught one of her nipples in his mouth and began, very gently, to suck.
She groaned, and her body seemed to lengthen, while her low back arched, giving him easier access.
He tongued her, and she was lost to the pleasure, to the need he’d aroused in her. As easily as that, she was lost.
He enjoyed her breasts, one and then the other, wetly and for a long, long time. Then, just when she thought she would lose her mind, Austin slid his hand down, between them, and unerringly found the crux of her thighs. He parted her with his fingers, chuckled when she gave a little cry of joyous despair.
“Feel good?” he teased, plying her, causing her to squirm on top of him, seeking more and more contact with his fingers.
“Damn you,” she gasped, “you know it does—”
“I’ll stop any time you want me to,” he declared in that butter-and-honey drawl of his, but he didn’t even slow down, let alone stop.
“Don’t—you—dare—” Paige groaned. He was picking up the pace, and she began instinctively to move her hips, needing more and then still more.
“What, Paige?” he asked, just before taking her nipple into his mouth again.
“Don’t—stop—” she whimpered, shameless in her need now, grinding against him.
He sucked. He caressed. And she came, hard, and for what seemed like an eternity. Every time her body buckled in full surrender, Austin asked more of her, and then still more. Finally, she fell against him, spent, unable even to imagine reaching another orgasm.
But she had another climax, and another after that, because Austin somehow managed to get her onto her knees, and then he slid beneath her, and she rode his seeking mouth, rode the dancing tip of his tongue, into a blaze that consumed her need, her reason, her everything.
The satisfaction was complete, although Paige knew, even as she descended from the heights, that Austin could arouse her again, with a few touches, a few murmured words, a few flicks of his tongue against her earlobe, or in the hollow of her throat, or…
He somehow arranged her so that she was lying beside him once more, in roughly the same place where the odyssey had begun. His arm was still around her and, as she sank back into herself, with little whimpers of residual pleasure, he soothed her with low murmurs.
She cried.
“Don’t,” he whispered, his lips moving against her temple.
“I can’t help it,” she sniffled. “It was—that was—”
“Shhh,” he breathed.
“So good—”
Austin chuckled. “Good is, well, a good thing, isn’t it?”
Not when it concerns you, Austin McKettrick.
“No,” Paige said. “We agreed not to let this happen, remember? Because we have at least fifty years of family gatherings ahead of us—christenings and graduations, birthdays and eventually weddings—”
“We agreed not to have sex, Paige,” he said reasonably.
“Well, maybe that wasn’t sex to you,” Paige retorted, letting herself nestle against him while she could, “but I had about five orgasms, so you’ll excuse me if my interpretation is different from yours.”
Austin chuckled. Wound a finger loosely in her hair. “Five,” he said, with pretended disappointment. “I was hoping to break your record.”
“Jerk,” Paige said without much conviction.
She felt Austin’s smile in the shift of muscles in his arms and chest and shoulder. Her body was like a tuning fork, still resonating to the chords he’d struck.
“Eight,” he recalled. “That’s your personal best.”
Paige felt it stirring again, the quiet, insistent ember that Austin would fan and fondle until it was a roaring blaze. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“That time we spread a blanket on the ground and made love under the stars,” Austin reminisced. “You were straddling me, and you came eight times.”
Should she laugh, or should she cry?
It was a toss-up.
“You counted?” she challenged.
“No,” Austin reminded her. “You did. You’d tense, and yell out a number—” He shifted, began to caress one of her breasts. “One—two—three—”
“Shut up.”
“You were so hot.”
“Stop it.”
“And, apparently, you’re still just as hot now.”
“Austin McKettrick,” Paige warned.
He laughed, but not for long.
Turnabout, after all, is considered fair play in most places.
Especially Texas.
SOMETHING COLD AND WET awakened Paige shortly before the sun came up.
Sprawled beside Austin in the antique bed, she opened her eyes and came face-to-face with Shep. Even with his leg bandaged so stiffly that he might as well have been wearing a cast, he’d managed to haul himself up off his blanket pile and hobble across the room.
He made a low sound and stared imploringly into Paige’s very soul.
Shep might have been in pain, but she knew that wasn’t his main concern at the moment.
“You need to go outside, huh?” she whispered with affection, reaching out to gently ruffle his ears.
Shep all but nodded his head.
Easing away from Austin, who was sleeping with an abandon so complete that Paige momentarily envied it, she got up, padded to the bedroom doorway.
Shep stumped along after her.
After grabbing a robe and a pair of slippers from the smaller room down the hall, where she’d expected to spend the night, Paige led the dog outside. Waited in the predawn chill while the poor critter teetered around, looking for a place to do his business.
A truck rattled up to the barn, and a man got out. Slammed the door.
Shep, finished with his outdoor duties, gave a growl.
Paige bent and got him by the scruff, peering through the gloom.
More by the sense of inner alarm than by sight, she recognized the man Austin had called Reese.
Shep tried to pull away, probably set to lunge across the yard and attack, but Paige tightened her hold on his hide and whispered a firm, “No.”
A red ember flared as Reese lit a cigarette; Paige caught the scent of it only a moment later.
She realized he’d seen her, but he didn’t move, and neither did she. He stood with one foot resting on the running board of his truck and smoked.
It was cold outside, so cold that Paige could see her breath. She wasn’t dressed for confrontation—she was still in her nightgown and robe—and besides that, she had to restrain Shep. Just the same, she stayed where she was until the ranch hand threw his cigarette down on the ground and made a show of grinding it out under his heel.
In the growing light, Reese spread his hands and bowed a little.
She ignored the gesture and turned, half pulling, half coaxing Shep to come along.
Austin was in the kitchen when she stepped inside, starting the coffeemaker.
As quickly as that, she forgot Reese.
“Mornin’,” Austin said with a slow grin and an even slower glance that swept from her head to her toes and then back up again. Paige blushed.
They hadn’t actually made love, she reminded herself.
As in, they hadn’t had intercourse.
She felt well loved, though.
And she’d probably howled like a she-wolf in heat.
“Good morning,” she said, raising her chin and injecting a certain cool formality into her tone. But inside her head, she heard her own greedy cries of pleasure, echoing from the night before.
Desperate to be busy, Paige scouted around until she found some kibble. She scooped a heap into a bowl, and set it down for Shep. He three-legged it over and began to eat.
“Excellent,” Paige said. “As soon as he has some food in his stomach, he can take his medicine.”
Dividing his attention between her and the dog, Austin just stood there, taking it all in. His mouth kicked up at one corner, though, and blue mischief sparkled in his eyes.
Paige felt incredibly self-conscious, standing there in a robe and slippers, which was strange, because for most of the night she’d been wearing nothing at all, and it hadn’t bothered her.
Austin chuckled and shook his head, went back to the coffeemaker and filled two mugs, even though the machine hadn’t finished the brewing cycle.
“Shall we drink our coffee out here, Nurse Remington?” he asked, raising one of the mugs in an insolent little salute. “Or should we take it back to bed?”
Paige glanced nervously at all three sets of stairs before blushing again so hard that it actually hurt a little, and whispering, “We are not going to bed, Austin.”
He handed her one cup of coffee and took an appreciative sip from the other. Over the rim, his eyes laughed at her.
“Seems to me that horse is already out of the barn,” he said.
“That wasn’t sex,” Paige told him in a furious undertone.
“And I never inhaled,” Austin replied. His whole face seemed to twinkle then, not just his eyes. The effect was a sunlight-on-water kind of dazzle.
“I was only—” Paige stopped, swallowed.
“Keeping me warm?” Austin prompted. “You did that, all right.”
She bit her lower lip. Remembered having to restrain the dog.
“I don’t think Shep likes that one ranch hand,” she said carefully.
“Which ranch hand, Paige?” Austin asked, turning his back to her now, looking out through the big window above the kitchen sink.
“The guy who was smoking in the barn. He pulled in a little while ago, while I was outside with Shep, and Shep wanted to go after him.”
Austin turned back. His eyes were tired, hollow with pain, but watchful, too. “Okay,” he said slowly. “I don’t much like the sound of that.”
Paige sighed. “Me, either.” It was obvious that Austin and Shep had bonded, but Shep was a stray and there was still a lot they didn’t know about him. There were three children and three other dogs on the place, and if Shep turned out to be aggressive, he would probably have to be destroyed. “Austin, do you think he’s dangerous?”
A grin quirked at the corner of Austin’s mouth. He relaxed, took another sip of coffee, savored it and swallowed before replying. “Reese—or the dog?”
“I was referring to Shep.”
“No,” Austin said, frowning and setting the mug aside. He was looking at her fluffy pink slippers—not her own fashion choice, but, hey. Calvin had given them to her for Christmas, and she would wear them for as long as they lasted. “What’s the matter with your feet? You keep shifting from one to the other.”
“Nothing,” Paige lied. “I’m all right.”
Those words, she thought wryly, recalling Doc Pomeroy’s story about Austin’s grandfather and the pitchfork, were practically the McKettrick family anthem. And here she was, learning to sing right along with the chorus.
“You’d best stick with the truth,” Austin counseled, approaching her, taking her by the shoulders, and easing her down into the antique rocking chair in the alcove, “because you’re pretty sorry at stretching it.”
Paige sighed. “It’s nothing serious,” she protested as Austin crouched in front of her, like the prince flourishing a glass slipper, and bared both her feet. “I might have gone rushing outside after you last night and forgotten to put on shoes—”
Gripping her right heel, Austin gently turned her foot and bent a little sideways to look at it.
There were a few small cuts and lots of bruises, left by small rocks in the yard and the driveway.
Austin gave a low whistle of exclamation and checked out her other foot. “No wonder you’ve been dancing around like an old-time movie cowboy dodging bullets.”
While Paige was still dealing with the disturbing discovery that she loved it when Austin McKettrick handled her feet, he left her long enough to retrieve the first aid kit. One-handed because of the dish-towel sling, he began to treat her injuries, minor as they were, with an uncommon tenderness.
He applied iodine, but only after holding up the bottle from the first aid kit and waiting for her to give him the go-ahead to use it.
Reluctantly, she nodded. The stuff would sting like holy-be-bingo, but it would also wipe out the germ population.
Paige braced herself, drew in a hissing breath when the medicine bit into her abrasions. Stoically endured the second round, on the bottom of her other foot.
That one hurt so badly that Paige, who was no wimp, almost cried.
Austin, noting her reaction, lifted the appendage, and blew lightly on her sole, cooling the burning sensation down a little.
It was the sort of thing her dad would have done, once upon a time. As kids, Libby, Julie and Paige were forever falling off bicycles, skinning their knees and elbows, and all the rest.
Will Remington always applied iodine, once the wound was clean, and he always blew on the sore place until the stinging stopped.
Austin, Paige thought sorrowfully, as he stood and set the first aid kit aside, would make an excellent father someday.
How would she stand it, she wondered, when the Right Woman came along, and Austin finally settled down, got married and started a family?
How in the world would she stand it?
CHAPTER NINE
AS SOON AS HE’D FINISHED medicating Paige’s feet, she slipped them into her slippers and boogied for her part of the house, blushing and avoiding his gaze.
Austin waited, sipping coffee a
t the kitchen table, until she’d had plenty of time to shower and get dressed and all the rest of it. Once she surfaced, he’d find a way to get into his clothes without her help—if she thought he was going to carry on like some invalid, which in Paige’s mind probably meant lying around in pajamas and sipping fluids through bent straws, she was sorely mistaken—and get on with his day.
When Paige finally resurfaced, looking delicious in crisp blue jeans and a gray pullover shirt, she was doubly careful not to look at him. She got real busy fussing over Shep, who had curled up on the rug in front of the fireplace nobody ever lit up anymore, patting his head, filling his water dish and the like.
Then Julie appeared at the top of the stairway leading to her and Garrett’s place, also wearing jeans and the same kind of pullover as Paige, except in a purplish color.
“Paige,” Julie called to her sister, “come and join Libby and me for breakfast. We have to settle on your bridesmaid’s dress.”
Paige rolled her eyes at that, but then she nodded, because there were some battles that couldn’t be won, and said, “Okay. Be there in a sec.”
Julie gave Austin a cheerful wave and vanished from sight.
Paige washed her hands at the sink and then turned to face Austin, leaning back against the counter. “You should probably eat something before you take your medication,” she said. Her tone and manner were so coolly professional that they might have been strangers instead of two people who’d been lovers as teenagers and gotten pretty chummy just the night before on top of that.
“Yeah,” he grumbled, his mood souring a little, mainly because he wanted things to be different between him and Paige and they weren’t.
She was his one-time lover, and so much more. And she was Libby and Julie’s baby sister, the one he wouldn’t be able to avoid, at least not gracefully, after the shindig on New Year’s Eve.
Once his brothers and their soon-to-be-wives started having kids—it wouldn’t be long, that was for sure—he’d be an uncle God only knew how many times over, and Paige would be an aunt to the whole brood.
The things that had happened between them the night before didn’t have to upset the balance at family gatherings—as long as the shenanigans didn’t continue. After all, he and Paige already had a history, didn’t they? And so far they’d been able to cope with living under the same roof, hadn’t they?
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